The present invention relates generally to semiconductor voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) devices, and more particularly to improved integrated designs of inductance-capacitance tank VCO devices.
The popularity of mobile telephones has placed exceptional attention to wireless architectures and circuit techniques. In addition, the reduction in scaling of complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technologies in recent years has resulted in significant improvements in the radio frequency (RF) performance of MOS devices. As an example of the CMOS RF technology improvements, single-chip transceiver designs have already been demonstrated using low-cost CMOS technology. RF CMOS integrated circuit (IC) technology has advanced to the point of commercial deployment.
One of the key elements of the wireless communications transceivers is voltage controlled oscillators (VCOs). They are part of the frequency synthesizer that generates the local oscillator (LO) signal for both up-conversion and down-conversion of the baseband signal. For monolithic integration into CMOS devices, inductance-capacitance (LC) tank oscillators are preferred over other oscillators due to its better relative phase noise performance and its low power consumption. Despite continuous improvements in VCOs, however, VCO design still remains both a bottleneck and the main challenge for RF transceiver design. These challenges include reducing phase noise, power consumption, and optimizing frequency tuning range. In LC tank VCOs, phase noise and power consumption depend primarily on the quality factor (Q) of the tank and the non-linearities of varactors, which are specially-designed P-N junction diodes, whose capacitance change significantly in the reverse bias mode. There are numerous varactor types: PN-junction, standard mode p/nMOS, or accumulation mode p/nMOS varactors. The frequency tuning range is determined by the capacitance tuning range of the varactor and the parasitic characteristics of the VCO. Therefore, the main task is to optimize the performance of the inductors and varactors. The control voltage applied to the VCO changes the capacitance value of the varactor, which determines the oscillation frequency of the VCO. The inductance, L, and the parallel capacitance, C, determine the oscillation frequency, f, of the VCO by the following equation:f=1/2π(LC)1/2 
Varactors are used to cover a certain frequency band. The active devices of the VCO overcome the losses in the tank. To reduce the phase noise of the VCO, the passive elements of the tank need to have large quality (Q) factors, since the quality factors of the tank quadratically influence the phase noise of the VCO. At frequencies suitable for mobile communications, the quality factors of integrated inductors are usually much lower than the quality factors of conventional diodes or MOS varactors. In these applications, the inductors determine the worst-case phase noise and whether or not the VCO specifications can be met.
The performance of integrated inductors is strongly influenced by losses through undesired currents in the substrate, or by the serial resistance of the inductor windings. In digital CMOS technologies, the thickness of the metal layers is much smaller than in bipolar and bi-CMOS technologies, thus leading to much higher serial resistances. Further the substrates are highly doped, thus leading to large substrate losses. Digital CMOS technologies allow the integration of both digital and analog functions on the same chip without exponentially increasing the cost of digital CMOS technology fabrication.
Moreover, conventional VCOs require a large die size, have low linearity, and have no signal modulation capability. The parasitic effects of the physical layout increase the variability of the set-on oscillator frequency. As such, oscillator frequency cannot be reliably predicted.
Therefore, desirable in the art of VCO designs are improved VCO designs with a smaller footprint, higher linearity, improved set-on oscillator frequency stability and signal modulation capability incorporated thereto.